News and Updates

Two papers in which I was involved have come out since I found time to update my website the last time. One on the automatic detection of partial cognates presented at the ACL 2016 conference in Berlin (common work with Philippe Lopez and Eric Bapteste, PDF here), and one on analogies between biology and linguistics, published in Biology direct (common work with Jananan Sylvestre Pathmanathan, Philippe Lopez, and Eric Bapteste, PDF here). While the first paper is rather technical and presents a new method that nicely handles partial cognates in multilingual wordlists (with all possible limitations of course), the latter is a review or opinion paper in which we try to identify new and fruitful analogies between evolutionary processes in biological and linguistic evolution. I also announced this paper in a new blogpost titled More on analogies between biological and linguistic evolution, and I hope that this may eventually lead to some larger fruitful discussion about analogies and methodological transfer between scientific disciplines.